Books
Reviews
hidden proofs (poems 1978-1980) – Bombshelter Press, 1982
“hidden proofs is vital writing….. His first collection is spectacular….. Poetic truth captures what we know but never say. In this way, hidden proofs contains so much truth, remembering a language of caring and touch, making you feel so tender and good again that you’ll hate to see it end.”
– Kenneth Funsten, LOS ANGELES TIMES
“Mohr has building poems for years, and hidden proofs reads less like a debut than a distillation. From the striking cover to the final poem’s shifting colors, the book dwells in illuminated moments, playing imagery of light and dark off the harsh material of autobiography and quotidian rhythms of employments and politics. (His poems) succeed in rescuing lost moments from the abyss of unexamined time in a simple, moving way.”
– Jimm Cushing, LOS ANGELES READER
“There are poems here full of heart, in which the emotions are screened by an artifice, not of trickery but of craft. These are poems of clarity, intelligence, deep feeling and humor, about living a life and watching closely.”
– Jocelyn Fisher, BEYOND BAROQUE Poetry News
“In their unpretentious beauty, Bill Mohr’s poems for the lovers and friends moving through his lif, and for the variegated drifters he meets in Los Angeles, recall some of Valejo’s work about Pris. Her, the Los Angeles poem, as we know it through Bukowski and Koertge, comes into its own. Mohr eschews the flamboyant, the tacky, and the sexually outrageous for a more mature vision. His affections are numerous. His skills are considerable. (hidden proofs) deserves a wide, appreciative audience.”
– Robert Peters
“Bill Mohr’s utilization of clear, unobtrusively but firmly rhythmic language to evoke the seemingly incomprehensible in life is heroic in itself, and his passion, dazzlingly apparent at every turn, imbues the hole with great strength. At the same time his eye remains attentive to both the details of wordage and the intricacies of his perceptions, focusing the work to pinpoint clarity. This is powerful poetry.”
– Dennis Cooper, author,The Tenderness of the Wolves
Vehemence – Compact Disc (New Alliance Records, 1993)
“The kind of organic, free-verse, non-esoteric poetry associated with Los Angeles and its poets is usually written by working-class, or lower, folk such as Charles Bukowksi. Today’s finest include Bill Mohr, who evocatively combines images of longing and desperation with wide-eyed wonderment.”
– Ellen Krout-Hasegawa, L.A. WEEKLY
“I played cuts from Vehemence, including the title one, repeatedly on my show for a whole year and enjoyed how the music of Mohr’s words matched the mood of a variety of musical tracks.” – Liza Richardson, Man-in-the-Moon, KCRW
HOLDOUTS: The Los Angeles Poetry Renaissance 1948 – 1992
University of Iowa Press (Fall, 2011)
“exhaustive, poignant, extraordinary” -- “superb” -- “terrific… a delight to read” --
“both accessible and authoritative …. an essential story of our cultural history”
“Bill Mohr’s exhaustive and poignant reclamation of the poems, small presses and various poetic communities of Los Angeles over four-plus decades. …. There’s nobody more qualified to conduct this literary anthropological dig than Mohr …. The insights and information – not only about individual poets and communities, but about the grunt work involved in being a typesetter and magazine editor – are priceless. … The more I spent time with Holdouts, the more I realized what an extraordinary gift it was, helping me reclaim some of my own poetic legacy and that of any writer who’s lived on the West Coast in the last half-century.” – Joe Safdie, Or magazine, issue no. 9 (Fall, 2012)
“Holdouts is the first serious, big-picture consideration of the often ignored or misunderstood post-war L.A. poetry scene. In a book both accessible and authoritative, Mohr tells an essential story of our cultural history with surprising, provocative and poetic insights into place, politics, and the people who contributed to what Mohr argues is an enduring art.”
– Andrew Tonkovich, Host, KPFK, “Bibliocracy”; Editor, Santa Monica Review
“Mohr captures this half-century of exuberant creativity in his terrific new book. … Mohr’s account is richly detailed and, with its anecdotes and portraits, a delight to read. The city comes alive through an eclectic and passionate group of people and their writing, publishing, reading and sharing. Further, Mohr’s is a generous and passionate voice, refusing the codify and cement a single history, but determined that there be some acknowledgement of the Los Angeles poetry renaissance and that it at once be part of a legacy, if only to question the limits, exclusions and boundedness of such a term.
– Holly Willis, “Arts and Culture,” KCET (January 17, 2012)
“The history of poetry is the history of change in poetry. … Bill Mohr’s superb Hold-Outs: The Los Angeles Poetry Renaissance, 1948-1992, (is) as decent a history of the poetry of that period as I’ve come across, whatever the focus.”
– Ron Silliman, Weblog, Tuesday 29, 2012
ON NOTICE:
“A dedicated editor and publisher, and now scholar and literary historian, Mohr has made an indelible mark on the city's literary history.”
– Stephen Motika, Palisades Post; (January 20, 2012)
“Bill Mohr’s HOLDOUTS offers a textured, historically variable, and theoretically alert profile of a literary milieu that is hard to keep in focus in the first place – much like Los Angeles itself. Each chapter has a singular focus, contributing to the whole from an oblique perspective. Mohr’s attention to the sociopolitical dynamic of L.A. landcape provides a welcome and at time
sagacious backdrop.”
– Jed Rasula, author, The American Poetry Wax Museum Reality Effects.
“(In HOLDOUTS) Mohr regularly brings clarity to intricate and convoluted cultural matters at the same time as he constructs useful frameworks for supporting the work of poets whose writing might otherwise go neglected. He continually finds importance in poems and in situations that he insightfully associates with a time and a place that he has summoned, with a sometime miraculous attention to detail, from out of dusty pages and obscure documents. His in-depth knowledge of the poetry scene in Los Angeles, and the energy he brings to unearthing the post-World War II years in which that scene began to take place, make his portrayals convincing on numerous levels, though his most important insight may be to remind us of the role poety can play in galvanizing community awareness.”
– Edward Brunner, author, Cold War Poetry
